Treasure Island Music Festival is this weekend in SF and we have a couple things to announce. First off, Tycho will be playing at 7PM on Saturday. There will also be an ISO50 / Tycho booth with prints, clothing, and music where we’ll be doing a meetup before and after the show. Scott, Jakub, Alex, and Jonathan will be at the booth from 4-5PM on Saturday and then after the Tycho set the whole band will be hanging out over there as well so drop by and say hello. Hope to see you out there!

Another day, another poster. I usually just do one poster for longer tours but this time around I wanted to do something specific for a couple of the shows this summer. First was the Troubadour print and now it’s this one for the July 14th Tycho show at Webster Hall in NYC.

The vinyl and digital of Tycho’s “Dive” single w/ remixes from Memoryhouse and Keep Shelly In Athens are out and available on the shop. Below are some details, i’d grab the clear opaque vinyl which is very limited and won’t be repressed.

Vinyl Details
The clear opaque vinyl is limited to 300 pressings, exclusively available through The Ghostly Store & ISO50.
The standard vinyl is limited to 700 pressings worldwide.
Each standard weight vinyl version features a 2-panel, 3mm spine, stock art jacket with a matte finish inserted in paper dust sleeves.

The title track on Tycho’s long-awaited Dive LP is just that—a ripple effect record that sounds like three songs in one, as if sound/graphic designer Scott Hansen just discovered prog-rock and decided to apply its winding passages to his own singular blend of sinewy synths and bleached beats. It’s also the first Tycho song to feature a prominent guest musician; guitarist Zac Brown, in this case, who paints outside the lines of Hansen’s halcyon hooks with restless rhythms and monorail-like riffs.

The “Dive” single fleshes things out even further, as Keep Shelly in Athens and Memoryhouse—both rising underground artists in their own right—cut Hansen’s cloud-scraping composition in half and slow his cruise control chords down to a crawl. The misty vocal melodies are still there, but they’re now floating through an embryonic assembly of jittery cicadas, rusty gears, and lean loops that are both welcoming and a bit woozy. The sonic equivalent of staring at the sun for too long, really, or two sides of the same cracked mirror.

Scott and the rest of the ISO50 blog family are really excited to announce 2 new contributors this week: Seth Hardie and Luca Venter, we’re really looking forward to reading and seeing what they post since both guys are insane Instagramers and we feel like they fit in perfectly.

Seth Hardie designs websites at Lift Interactive. He is an avid photographer and spends as much time as possible in the forests of Alberta.

Luca Venter is a 16 year old photographer based in Denver, CO. I met him at the Denver Tycho show after we featured his Instagram photo on the blog. I definitely noticed right after researching everything he does that he has a solid vision and he probably has the best eyeglasses and shoes in all of Colorado. If you get a chance check out his website, he has great band photos which seem to be his cup of tea.

Turn down the lights, fire up the projector and light a candle if that’s your style…here’s my picks for the Top 15 Music Videos Of 2011. I tried to encompass a lot of image styles and music in this list. There’s all types of directors and production scales ranging from Canon 7D equipped bare bones budgets to freaking Michel Gondry shooting stop motion on a Bolex (or so I read). I think that’s what’s crazy and great about being a director and designer in this time. If you want to, you have access to pretty much everything (visually speaking) if you put time into it. Hopefully some directors, DPs and photographers are inspired by this, it was a good year for the moving image and I suspect it to only get better and more creative in 2012. Hope you all dig the list and if you make it through each video all the way through, no skipping…you can rule out any form of attention deficit disorder.

I haven’t listed any of these in a rank, only because they’re all good at specific things. However, if I had to pick one favorite, it’d be Eric Epstein’s magically haunting work for Memory Tapes.

You may remember San Diego based director / photographer Charles Bergquist from our post a while back on his projections collection. We’re all big fans of his work and through Ghostly and Tycho we have worked with him a lot over the past year. I am currently working with him on the new Tycho live visuals set and realized he would make a great contributor to the blog. Charles will mostly be doing video and photographic posts with a focus on process / equipment (like his soon-to-be-delivered Red Scarlet).

So everybody give Charles a warm welcome, his first post should be coming shortly.

When I first started to hear the new Beacon EP live on stage it reminded me if Underworld meets James Blake but once masters came back I got to experience their signature deep south low end and it had more of that R+B feel that Active Child or How To Dress Well have been parading. What really grabs me is the hi-fi simplicity mixed in with that feeling that their not trying to make pop music, such a hard thing to pull off, download their FREE single here and watch the trailer below which includes the song Exhale, their EP drops on Nov. 15th.

Warm Ghost will be in my top 10 albums of 2011 no question, so it was a joy to discover this remix today by School Of Seven Bells, the addition of female vocals takes this off this planet and puts it in a new dimension.

What is there not to love about Keep Shelly In Athens? I mean I always hear a new synth usage effected in a way no one else is doing, her vocals are sounding so marvelous for the style their going for.

Phantogram is powering thru with their sound, its got the force to beast thru and become a pop juggernaut while still hanging onto their sound and swirling in some influences from Blonde Redhead and TV on the Radio.